Dead Letter Circus - Kim Benzie

Questions: Jo Taylor

Rising from the ashes of local band Ochre, Brisbane's Dead letter Circus formed in late 2004. After releasing a number of singles, the alternative rock band dropped their first album This Is A Warning in 2010. The album, which debuted at No.2 on the Australian charts, was later certified Gold and spawned a string radio singles. The five piece band are now about to hit the road for a 12 date Australian tour in support of their eagerly awaited follow up album The Catalyst Fire. Caught In The Mosh recently spoke to lead singer Kim Benzie about the departure of founding member Rob Maric, the artwork behind the new album inspired by his experience with the hallucinogen Ayahuasca and what inspired the lyrics. It's now been just over a week since your dynamic sophomore album The Catalyst Fire was released. How has the response been so far?Ah, it’s been amazing! Everyone’s been really supportive. Everyone seems to love it. It’s pretty much the best result we could’ve hoped for. We’re just really happy and honoured. It’s been great. How did the departure of fellow songwriter Rob Maric change the writing process for the band?It was a little bit devastating at the start when it first happened. In the past Rob and I would be the ones who would begin the concepts and then bring them in and flesh them out with the rest of the band. But what it’s done is encourage everyone in the band to bring in ideas and they were really great ideas as well. The whole band just became more creative after his departure. Rob was very particular about certain things, so I guess it just gave us a certain freedom.

You worked with producer Forrester Savell who you worked with previously on your first two releases. Does the process get easier with each recording since you all know how each other work? Did it differ from the previous recordings?I wouldn’t say it gets easier because we’re the fussiest, most meticulous bunch of guys you’ve ever met when it comes to the music. That’s why the music has really closely interlocking layers. We’re all very fussy, so it’s never easy. But this time around, we were a lot more organised than we were and much more confident in what we do. When we did This Is A Warning, a lot of those songs we only went in there with 30 seconds of music and then just improvised the rest over the course of a couple of days. On this one, we went in with the songs written. There was so much guess work on the last one, like how can we do a mellow song without having it sounding like a ballad and all these other things floating through our minds, but this time we were a lot more confident. How much do you take into account the live performance when writing songs?I guess you just have an inkling as to what is going to work well live, and sound big and get people moving. The emotional content of the DLC with everyone screaming the words which you sometimes try to imagine when your singing, but it doesn’t necessarily dictate the writing, it just something that you think as you’re writing “oh yeah, I think this will sound good live”. The songs tend to just give birth through us, we’re just a vessel for it. Conjure it.

The artwork for the new album is amazing and it’s also referenced in the first single Lodestars music clip. What’s the idea behind the artwork and how much input did you have?What the goal was to create a piece of artwork that would suit the music. I’ve always been a big fan of when you’re staring at a piece of artwork and somehow, you’re not sure how, it matches what you’re listening to. A lot of our artwork is great art on it’s own, its just a cool piece to look at, but if it has a connection that’s the next step. We have always tried to do that from the start.

How this piece came together was an extraordinary journey. I traveled to the Amazon twice at the beginning of 2012. On my second trip there, I went to go drink Ayahuasca with the Shipibo tribe there. I met this incredible woman, Klara Soukalova, who’s actually a westerner that’s studying to become a shaman. She’s about 5 years into her 20-year apprenticeship. She’s also an amazing artist. She creates this incredible symbolic artwork in this language that she has created. It literally looks like you’ve stumbled across something from another race of beings. It’s phenomenal. She’s there as a massive part of the fight in the Amazon going on with the oil companies and trying to help the natives reclaim their land while she’s studying. Anyway, she really loved the message of the band, so I asked if she’d like to collaborate with us on the artwork. A piece that anyone, of any walk of life could have a positive experience with, that connected with the music. She agreed to do it. Over the course of about 2 months she worked with an artist back here in Australia. We all corresponded over messenger and she would send us some symbols. We did 102 versions of it until we got the final one. The end result we named Guilty Mandala. Until we finished it, we weren’t sure it was going to happen. It reminds me of the artwork of Tool’s Lateralus album by Alex Grey.Yeah! We’re actually all massive fans of the artist Alex Grey that did that album artwork, regardless of the Tool connection. Yeah, he’s one of our favourite artists.

You mentioned the Ayahuasca ceremony, which you were involved in whilst in the Amazon. I’m intrigued. What that was like?Simply put, its a chance to detach from your ego driven self, and your ego being, your reactionary skin that you’ve had since being birth, if that makes sense. It makes you step back from that and view the world from a really pure, clean set of eyes. It also gives you an opportunity to dump some of that accumulative life baggage that you’ve got, and recognise it, in a really short space of time, which could be equivalent to 10 years of psychotherapy. I was already heading on the right path, I think, but it really just opened my eyes about what I want to do with my life and do it with less of that programming affecting my vision and my art. It was the most amazing thing I’ve done in my life. The thing is though, I’m very much about it being done in the right setting with someone who has done the right training, like my experience in Peru. It should never be done by a backyard operator that taught themselves. It’s actually like a 20 year apprenticeship, so if it’s done by anyone that’s not in at least their 40’s or 50’s then they’re a fake. Your lyrics are always relatable, what inspired your writing with this album?Previously I’d written a lot about relationships, however there is none of that on this album. It’s more so about the awakening mind within this world. On the last album, it was about a call to wake up. But now it seems there are a lot of people that are awake to the mechanics of the world and no one trusts the government. But the problem that comes with that is “Well, I’m just one person, what can I do about it?” But the way the few control the many is through creating the illusion that we’re actually separate and powerless. A lot of it is to do with television and how we’re entertained and how we’re informed and how we get that information. The key is to have community again. We’re seeing some of those countries where people go riot on the street and they’re overthrowing governments. The shit is getting real over there because their not as numb and haven’t been programmed as we seem to be. We’ve also got the ‘good life’ and are comfortable here. So a lot of the album stems from the guilt associated with being a comfortable westerner as well. Living across Australia and you realise that some of your apathy and your refusal to open your eyes to what’s going on is actually indirectly responsible for what your seeing on TV and thinking that’s atrocious and I can’t believe its happening. But really, you’re indirectly responsible for some of that.

Yeah. Traveling to other countries opens up your eyes to your life experiences compared to those of others which can sometimes bring upon a huge amount of guilt when you realise how lucky you were to be where you are, but also how little you’ve perhaps been aware or acknowledged how you could in fact help their situation.Yeah! And then you take it to the next step where you look at how you’ve impacted on that through the products that you’ve brought, that have in fact contributed to their situation. Yeah, you get it. So the concept to the name is that conversation that we just had and we confirm that for each other and realise that this is another person that’s awake to the world and then you go have that conversation with someone else, and I do the same thing and slowly its spreading. That’s the concept of The Catalyst Fire. To inspire change. Speaking of travel, you head to South Africa to headline the Krank'd up festival. Have you ever played, or even been to South Africa before?No, we haven’t. We’re pumped! We’ll hopefully have a week there so we can see some stuff while we’re there and check it out. I’m really intrigued. It’ll be cool to meet Die Antwood! Thanks for your time and good luck with the tour.Thanks, we’re pumped to play the new stuff live!